land stewardship project

If you live in Minneapolis, and are a local food junkie, you might have heard some rumblings about the Urban Agriculture Zoning Text Amendments that are coming before the City Council's Zoning and Planning Comittee on March 1. This process, prompted by Homegrown Minneapolis way back in 2008, has been a long time coming in terms of making urban agriculture a legal use of land in the City of Minneapolis. After a two-year process in which stakeholders, urban farmers, city officials, and neighborhood residents have agonized over striking the right balance between the entrepreneurial urban farmers’ needs and neighbors’ peace of mind, these amendments to the Minneapolis zoning code are in danger of being severely weakened to the point of undoing all of the careful work by city planners, citizen advisory committees and urban farmers.

Last week I found myself in a conference room with an aquaculturalist, a mushroom grower, a hops grower, and a handful of CSA farmers.

This may sound like a great setup for a terrible joke, but the occasion was a serious one. We were sitting in Minneapolis City Hall along with an assortment of other farmers, gardeners, would-be farmers, extension workers, advocates, and city planners, all with lists of policy goals spread out in front of them on the table. The extraordinary thing is that most of them do their growing right here inside the Minneapolis city limits, and that’s why they made the trip to City Hall: to have a say in the first public meeting for implementing newzoningpolicies for urban agriculture here in the Minne Apple.

The place: Acorn Ridge Farm of Mel and Lorna Wiens in Staples, Minnesota. The weather: steamy and sticky. The event: the 3rd annual Festival of Farms, hosted by Sustainable Farming Association (SFA) Central Chapter. Drop the title and formalities and you have a gathering that felt more like a beloved family reunion than an event open to the public.

This week marks the end of October, the end of Daylight Savings Time, and the end of the season for most of the area’s farmers markets. So get out there and visit your favorites one last time, bid auld lang syne, and promise to greet them next spring when they return.

There is a new federal source of funding for landowners who want technical and financial support as they convert their farms to organic production or add certain practices to their already-certified operations. The Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) Organic Initiative has just been announced with a 3-week sign-up period that ends May 29, 2009. All applications must be turned in to your home county Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) office by that date.